


What I Am

by curvasud



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:30:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curvasud/pseuds/curvasud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Andriy Shevchenko is a fighter. A boxer, he likes to think of it, but the truth is he has no pleasure of such glamour."</p>
            </blockquote>





	What I Am

  
  
_Let your light shine before men._   


Andriy Shevchenko is a fighter. A boxer, he likes to think of it, but the truth is he has no pleasure of such glamour. On a good day, his ring is a dizzy circle of rowdy, toothless men, who are probably no strangers to the faces of angry, swinging fists themselves; on worse days, he fights for the pure exhilaration of the game, dodging mishits and throwing looser-than-usual punches—obviously he doesn’t try as hard when his only audience on these days is the lewd doodles on a back alley’s walls. But Andriy doesn’t have very many of these days; he is, after all, the best at what he does, and he never loses.

Andriy Shevchenko is _the_ fighter.

He has never met a tougher opponent than this Ricky boy, who is, perhaps, the fight.

 

“What the fuck is going on?”

Andriy hates this, whatever this is—one of the games Ricky likes to play, he supposes; the youthful son of Evangelist parents is naturally a rebel, having been forced to move with them from mission to mission for as long as he has been alive (although they have been in Italy for years now, choosing to use mainly a lifestyle approach to effect Eternal Salvation to the lower-class Catholics—still, Andriy remembers that there is no permanency, nothing, nobody, he can count on, and religion has never been appealing to him anyway).

They met one day when the Leite family showed up at Andriy’s door, and Ricky nearly dropped his box of pocket Bibles when he saw the bumps and bruises from one of the more fierce fights on his face. But Bosco and Simone, bless them, weren’t fazed; they kindly offered help, a new way of life, a proper path, even directions to their church, and they were so sickeningly pleasant that Andriy had to slam the door shut before he act on hostile instincts.

“I’ll pray for him,” Ricky’s mother said, a genuinely disappointed look on her pretty face. “Come along then, boys.”

But Ricky shoved the gospel tracts into his brother’s arms and made some bad excuses about bathrooms and bladders and I’ll-meet-up-with-you-later, and the next thing he knew, he was on Andriy’s doorstep again, modestly proposing that they do something for which he could go to Confession later. Andriy looked at the barely-legal church boy, the nervous flicks of his thin wrists as their hands play with the hem of his shirt, the shy, suggestive glint in his eyes—said _va bene_ , and that was how it all started, really, and how it never ended. Because after that first time—when Andriy was trying to sleep off the fuck and failing to because Ricky’s light grazing and tracing of those bumps and bruises were distracting, so he told the boy to get out, which he did but—he kept coming back and challenging for more, and, fuck, Andriy never loses.

Anyway:

“You always want to fight,” Ricky says, leading Andriy further into the absolutely dark room. They stop and the boy lets go of Andriy’s hand. Then a few oil lamps wink on and the room is illuminated enough for Andriy to see that Ricky has pressed all his furniture against the walls, leaving only a dilapidated rug under his feet—a makeshift ring. Andriy also sees that Ricky is naked, grinning, and he wonders how his eyes had traveled to every thing else in the room first. “So fight me.”

Andriy licks his lip. “You don’t know how to hit.”

“Try me,” Ricky says playfully, running his fingers along the buttons of the other man’s shirt. “Come on.”

“I’m not going to fight you.”

“Not in those clothes you’re not,” Ricky murmurs before pulling away with a smug smile. “Strip.”

 _Well, if you insist._

Andriy unbuttons his shirt and tugs it off his shoulders. He raises an eyebrow at Ricky and lets the shirt dangle from his hand for a few seconds, then drops it idly on the floor. Next, he pulls the a-shirt over his head and adds it to a forming pile.

“Your slacks too,” Ricky reminds him. “You can’t move properly in those.”

Andriy stoically pushes down his pants and kicks them over to join the other discarded clothes. When he looks up, Ricky has stepped back onto the rug and started circling him, still boyish in manner but now half-hard.

“I think…” Ricky begins, drawing smaller and smaller loops around Andriy, “…from now on, you should only fight me.”

“Don’t worry,” Andriy replies dryly, “I can assure you that my usual street endeavors are rarely this…intimate.”

“I am not jealous, if that’s what you think this is about. But I am worried,” Ricky admits, touching a few dark purple blotches across the fighter’s chest. Andriy sucks in a breath.

“Don’t worry,” he repeats, trying to keep his hands behind his back and resist the urge to shove the boy on his back and… _Damn it, never make the first move._ He flashes a rare smile. “I’m Andriy Shevchenko.”

Ricky brushes his lips against one of the bruises. “So?”

“I’m fucking great.”

“Ah.” Pause. “Then how come—”

Andriy has to laugh. “I said I’m great, Ricky, not invincible.”

The boy feels the brief sting of being patronized and thinks that he needs to be bolder. “I see,” he says cheekily, and then dares to grab Andriy’s fully erect cock. “Tell me about your greatness.”

Andriy narrows his eyes and looks for a moment as though he may finally consent to hitting the boy after all on the merit of the mocking tone alone, but he lets out a low moan instead when Ricky begins stroking.

“Between a good fighter and a great fighter,” he says, struggling to keep in control—he’ll indulge his lover, he decides, but this is still _his_ game, “there is actually very little difference.”

“Go on.”

“It’s…it’s psychological. What sets a fighter apart…”—Andriy bites back a moan—“is the ability to cope with pressure.”

“Pressure,” Ricky echoes, increasing his handiwork’s strength and speed as he adds lubricant.

“Pressure excites me. Pressure…keeps me focused one hundred percent. And no one else places more pressure on me than myself.”

“Tell me more,” Ricky pants softly.

“I’m not scared of pressure,” Andriy gasps, moving his hands to grip Ricky’s arms now. “I _like_ it.”

That’s when Ricky suddenly lets go and takes a swing at Andriy—who swears and moves out of the way just in time for the knuckles to skim his cheek. Both furious and amused, Andriy grabs the offending arm and twists it behind Ricky’s back, pressing against the boy tightly.

“Positional awareness and the ability to anticipate a move before it happens is very important to a fighter,” he says. “I _have_ that talent.”

“You’re hurting me,” Ricky says breathlessly, pressing back against Andriy.

“What were you thinking? You know I never lose.” To emphasize his point, or the heat of the moment, or both, Andriy rubs his impossibly hard cock against the boy’s ass.

Ricky moans. “I think…you’re afraid of losing.”

“And why is that?” Andriy releases the boy and turns him around, looking unusually curious.

“Every defeat gives you something more—something more than you can handle, something greater than your greatness. It gives you a hunger, a desire, more than a want—it’s a need. A need for more than just your fists and your feet, a need for something, or someone, maybe…and it could be beautiful.” To emphasize his point, or the affection of the moment, or both, Ricky lifts Andriy’s calloused hands and kisses them tenderly.

“It terrifies you.”

**Author's Note:**

> • Nearly all of the quotes in the "fight scene" are inspired by or altered/directly taken from [this ad](http://youtube.com/watch?v=6GvkuErvwK4).  
> • I sincerely apologize for the murder of any known characteristics of Kakà and Sheva and Kakà/Sheva and accept full responsibility for all unfathomable distinctions.


End file.
